Kent State's Chris Evans Earns Wednesday Player Honors

You might have missed Kent State's 87-70 win over Miami on Wednesday night. It was over early, and despite signs that the Flashes might have a little bit of upward mobility in the MAC, they haven't really done much.

So the game just ended up being one of those where one teams walks away a step closer to .500 in their league and the other goes back to trying to put the pieces together on a rebuilding effort under a new coach, and without last season's best player (oh, Julian Mavunga, we miss you).

And if you weren't paying any attention, you probably missed the line that Chris Evans put up go through the list of the three top performers of the night on 4-Letter's scoreboard page. That was because later in the evening, several players had more points, or more assists, or more somethings that made their night more impressive by the 4-Letter's standards than what Evans did.

I am beginning to think we need to apply #theyredoingitwrong to a number of things that 4-Letter does.

As the hour got later, and Evans was since gone (although saved on a browser window to check officially), Dr. Geeves and I were debating which player had the best night. We had several candidates: Delaware's Jamelle Hagins, Wilmington's Keith Rendleman, and Bucknell's Mike Muscala were on the initial list. We later threw on Illinois State's Jackie Carmichael.

And let's be clear, those were very good performances -- several had Game Scores in the 60s, including Carmichael.

But then there was Chris Evans, who had 22 points (9-for-14 FG), 13 rebounds (4 offensive), two assists, four of the 11 Kent State steals, a block, and just one turnover. He also had no fouls, and played a scant 28 minutes.

That is making the most of his minutes to pack that score sheet (and one of his more efficient evenings on the offensive end. Chances are that his defensive contributions -- the steals, the rebounds, the block -- will be overlooked just based on that shooting performance).

The bottom line was that Evans walked away from the night with a Game Score of 74, the best we saw on the evening, in the small list of players that we ran. Kent State walked away with a win, and stayed in the hunt for third place in the MAC East, and a more beneficial seeding in the conference tournament.

We salute you Chris Evans, our player of Wednesday evening.